The Awkward Age by Henry James (simple ebook reader txt) 📖

HER!” he smiled, “if you like. If you don’t believe Mrs. Donner is dust and ashes to me,” he continued, “you do little justice to your daughter.”

“Do you wish to break it to me that you’re in love with Nanda?”

He hesitated, but only as if to give weight to his reply. “Awfully. I can’t tell you how I like her.”

She wondered. “And pray how will THAT help me? Help me, I mean, to help you. Is it what I’m to tell your wife?”

He sat looking away, but he evidently had his idea, which he at last produced. “Why wouldn’t it be just the thing? It would exactly prove my purity.”

There might have been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. “I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would ‘prove’ HER purity. And you could be quite at ease,” she laughed—“he wouldn’t make any presents!”

Mr. Cashmore regarded her with a candour that was almost a reproach to her mirth. “I like your daughter better than I like you.”

But it only amused her more. “Is that perhaps because I don’t prove your purity?”

What he might have replied remained in the air, for the door opened so exactly at the moment she spoke that he rose again with a start and the butler, coming in, received her enquiry full in the face. This functionary’s answer to it, however, had no more than the usual austerity. “Mr. Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon.”

These visitors took a minute to appear, and Mrs. Brook, not stirring— still only looking from the sofa calmly up at Mr. Cashmore—used the time, it might have seemed, for correcting any impression of undue levity made by her recent question. “Where did you last meet Nanda?”

He glanced at the door to see if he were heard. “At the Grendons’.”

“So you do go there?”

“I went over from Hicks the other day for an hour.”

“And Carrie was there?”

“Yes. It was a dreadful horrid bore. But I talked only to your daughter.”

She got up—the others were at hand—and offered Mr. Cashmore an expression that might have struck him as strange. “It’s serious.”

“Serious?”—he had no eyes for the others.

“She didn’t tell me.”

He gave a sound, controlled by discretion, which sufficed none the less to make Mr. Longdon—beholding him for the first time—receive it with a little of the stiffness of a person greeted with a guffaw. Mr. Cashmore visibly liked this silence of Nanda’s about their meeting.

II

Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: “Talk to Mr. Longdon—take him off THERE.” She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her “adored” Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, constituted for her, in her own corner, as soon as she had made it, the ground of an appeal. “Will he hate me any worse for doing that?”

Vanderbank glanced at the others. “Will Cashmore, do you mean?”

“Dear no—I don’t care whom HE hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes.”

“Then don’t try quite so hard!” Vanderbank laughed. “Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore’s arms?”

“Yes, precisely—so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him by this time so well. I only want, heaven help me, to be as nice to him as I possibly can.”

“That’s quite the best thing for you and altogether why, this afternoon, I brought him: he might have better luck in finding you—it was he who suggested it—than he has had by himself. I’m in a general way,” Vanderbank added, “watching over him.”

“I see—and he’s watching over you.” Mrs. Brook’s sweet vacancy had already taken in so much. “He wants to judge of what I may be doing to you—he wants to save you from me. He quite detests me.”

Vanderbank, with the interest as well as the amusement, fairly threw himself back. “There’s nobody like you—you’re too magnificent!”

“I AM; and that I can look the truth in the face and not be angry or silly about it is, as you know, the one thing in the world for which I think a bit well of myself.”

“Oh yes, I know—I know; you’re too wonderful!”

Mrs. Brookenham, in a brief pause, completed her covert consciousness. “They’re doing beautifully—he’s taking Cashmore with a seriousness!”

“And with what is Cashmore taking him?”

“With the hope that from one moment to another Nanda may come in.”

“But how on earth does that concern him?”

“Through an extraordinary fancy he has suddenly taken to her.” Mrs. Brook had been swift to master the facts. “He has been meeting her at Tishy’s, and she has talked to him so effectually about his behaviour that she has quite made him cease to care for Carrie. He prefers HER now—and of course she’s much nicer.”

Vanderbank’s attention, it was clear, had now been fully seized. “She’s much nicer. Rather! What you mean is,” he asked the next moment, “that Nanda, this afternoon, has been the object of his call?”

“Yes—really; though he tried to keep it from me. She makes him feel,” she went on, “so innocent and good.”

Her companion for a moment said nothing; but then at last: “And WILL she come in?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Don’t you know where she is?”

“I suppose she’s with Tishy, who has returned to town.”

Vanderbank turned this over. “Is that your system now—to ask no questions?”

“Why SHOULD I ask any—when I want her life to be as much as possible like my own? It’s simply that the hour has struck, as you know. From the moment she IS down the only thing for us is to live as friends. I think it’s so vulgar,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “not to have the same good manners with one’s children as one has with other people. She asks ME nothing.”

“Nothing?” Vanderbank echoed.

“Nothing.”

He paused again; after which, “It’s very disgusting!” he declared. Then while she took it up as he had taken her word of a moment before, “It’s very preposterous,” he continued.

Mrs. Brook appeared at a loss. “Do you mean her helping him?”

“It’s not of Nanda I’m speaking—it’s of him.” Vanderbank spoke with a certain impatience. “His being with her in any sort of direct relation at all. His mixing her up with his other beastly affairs.”

Mrs. Brook looked intelligent and wan about it, but also perfectly good-humoured. “My dear man, he and his affairs ARE such twaddle!”

Vanderbank laughed in spite of himself. “And does that make it any better?”

Mrs. Brook thought, but presently had a light—she almost smiled with it. “For US!” Then more woefully, “Don’t you want Carrie to be saved?” she asked.

“Why should I? Not a jot. Carrie be hanged!”

“But it’s for Fanny,” Mrs. Brook protested. “If Carrie IS rescued it’s a pretext the less for Fanny.” As the young man looked for an instant rather gloomily vague she softly quavered: “I suppose you don’t positively WANT Fanny to bolt?”

“To bolt?”

“Surely I’ve not to remind you at this time of day how Captain Dent-Douglas is always round the corner with the post-chaise, and how tight, on our side, we’re all clutching her.”

“But why not let her go?”

Mrs. Brook, at this, showed real resentment. “‘Go’? Then what would become of us?” She recalled his wandering fancy. “She’s the delight of our life.”

“Oh!” Vanderbank sceptically murmured.

“She’s the ornament of our circle,” his companion insisted. “She will, she won’t—she won’t, she will! It’s the excitement, every day, of plucking the daisy over.” Vanderbank’s attention, as she spoke, had attached itself across the room to Mr. Longdon; it gave her thus an image of the way his imagination had just seemed to her to stray, and she saw a reason in it moreover for her coming up in another place.

“Isn’t he rather rich?” She allowed the question all its effect of abruptness.

Vanderbank looked round at her. “Mr. Longdon? I haven’t the least idea.”

“Not after becoming so intimate? It’s usually, with people, the very first thing I get my impression of.” There came into her face for another glance at their friend no crudity of curiosity, but an expression more tenderly wistful. “He must have some mysterious box under his bed.”

“Down in Suffolk?—a miser’s hoard? Who knows? I dare say,” Vanderbank went on. “He isn’t a miser, but he strikes me as careful.”

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had thought it out. “Then he has something to be careful of; it would take something really handsome to inspire in a man like him that sort of interest. With his small expenses all these years his savings must be immense. And how could he have proposed to mamma unless he had originally had money?”

If Vanderbank a little helplessly wondered he also laughed. “You must remember your mother refused him.”

“Ah but not because there wasn’t enough.”

“No—I imagine the force of the blow for him was just in the other reason.”

“Well, it would have been in that one just as much if that one had been the other.” Mrs. Brook was sagacious, though a trifle obscure, and she pursued the next moment: “Mamma was so sincere. The fortune was nothing to her. That shows it was immense.”

“It couldn’t have been as great as your logic,” Vanderbank smiled; “but of course if it has been growing ever since—!”

“I can see it grow while he sits there,” Mrs. Brook declared. But her logic had in fact its own law, and her next transition was an equal jump. “It was too lovely, the frankness of your admission a minute ago that I affect him uncannily. Ah don’t spoil it by explanations!” she beautifully pleaded: “he’s not the first and he won’t be the last with whom I shall not have been what they call a combination. The only thing that matters is that I mustn’t, if possible, make the case worse. So you must guide me. What IS one to do?”

Vanderbank, now amused again, looked at her kindly. “Be yourself, my dear woman. Obey your fine instincts.”

“How can you be,” she sweetly asked, “so hideously hypocritical? You know as well as you sit there that my fine instincts are the thing in the world you’re most in terror of. ‘Be myself?’” she echoed. “What you’d LIKE to say is: ‘Be somebody else—that’s your only chance.’ Well, I’ll try—I’ll try.”

He laughed again, shaking his head. “Don’t—don’t.”

“You mean it’s too hopeless? There’s no way of effacing the bad impression or of starting a good one?” On this, with a drop of his mirth, he met her eyes, and for an instant, through the superficial levity of their talk, they might have appeared to sound each other. It lasted till Mrs. Brook went on: “I should really like not to lose him.”

Vanderbank seemed to understand and at last said: “I think you won’t lose him.”

“Do you mean you’ll help me, Van, you WILL?” Her voice had at moments the most touching tones of any in England, and humble, helpless, affectionate, she spoke with a familiarity of friendship. “It’s for the sense of the link with mamma,” she explained. “He’s simply full of her.”

“Oh I know. He’s prodigious.”

“He has told you more—he comes back to it?” Mrs. Brook eagerly asked.

“Well,”